Of Mending
by lovelylovelyday
Summary: This had never been on Amy Pond's excitement list. Discovering planets with multiple moons? Yep. Travelling to the year 900 B.C.? Of course. Being forced to mend long-standing psychological wounds? No, not quite. /WARNING: Deals heavily with bluntly implied rape and abuse/
1. Chapter 1

"Help."

Just a simple word. Small, compact, but not without meaning.

"Please. Help me." The little, delicate voice stirred the room's energy slowly, letting the complexity of the situation fully settle, gather, and begin to dissolve any sense of reason that happened to be strolling by. It came from a floating letter, just curling in and out just in front of the Doctor's eyes, transfixing all of them.

Rory and Amy's expressions were the most understandable. The blatant confusion was evident in her bright, young eyes, and concern was easily found in his ever-creasing forehead. Amy repeated the words to herself. _Help. Please. Help me._ It was definitely a child, she assumed, noticing the high crest of the words and the wavering tone. A female child. A scared child. But, why? She took to looking anxiously at Rory, but discovered no explanation in his slightly agape mouth and wondering eyes. So, she looked at the Doctor. After all, if there were ever a man to understand something like this, it would be him.

He truly hated it when she looked at him that way; all expectant and hopeful, like he knew all the answers. Because the truth was and always would be something he would never care to admit—that he didn't know everything. Compared to the amount of knowledge psychologically attainable, he hardly knew _anything_, and yet she kept looking at him like that.

"Help… please, help me. It hurts. Make it s-stop." The child was crying now, softly, and it completely ripped apart the Doctor's consciousness. He knew very well that children cried for attention, they wanted to be heard and acknowledged. But this girl was crying quietly, attempting to go unnoticed. She didn't want to be heard, and that could only mean one thing: The creature hurting her was close enough for her to fear it hearing her.

The Doctor took hold of the letter and looked it over. Nothing was written on it, nothing at all except a small address and time for Oregon in 1983. He tried talking to the little girl several times, but she didn't seem to be getting his voice at the other end. Amy and Rory's confusion grew until they too were trying to call to the girl. Eventually, the child had cried through all of her tears and fell—presumably—asleep.

"Who _is_ she?" Amy questioned when at last the girl had ceased sobbing. "What's going on?"

"I don't know." the Doctor admitted, frustratedly running his hands through his mop of hair. He walked back and forth, pacing, thinking. The once-father inside of him supposed he ought to go check up on the girl—make sure she was alright, and do something if she wasn't—but his obnoxiously sensible side determined that he had already meddled enough for a century or two, and he really should just stay out of things for the meantime. But what if she's hurt, really hurt? What then? Would he just stand idly by and allow a little girl to get hurt? Is _that_ the sort of man he was turning in to?

"Well," he said, clapping his hands together smartly and staring unsurely at a continuously confused pair of Ponds. "How do you two feel about 1983 Oregon?"


	2. Chapter 2

"Doctor?" Amy called, looking at him intently. He'd been working with the console for hours, trying to find the exact right time where the girl was. He was a wreck, and Amy was worried. She had never seen this nervous, restless, fidgety side of him before, and it scared the hell out of her.

"Are you being logical about all this?" she asked carefully, leaning against the console.

"Since when have I been logical about things?" he muttered, flipping a switch that sent hot purple sparks out. After a moment of surprise, he turned distractedly to Amy. She was pained to see how much sadness there was in his eyes. All of the sudden, his age was showing more prominently than it ever had before.

"Are you alright?" she said in an undertone, her eyes searching his for a sign of fever or just sheer insanity.

He nodded after a second or two, letting his eyes and hands drop to the console once again. "Yeah, yeah. Fine. I just…"

"Kids exaggerate, you know." She reminded him.

"_Yes_, I know. But not her. Not this one." He sounded so sure, so positive that this girl was in grave danger. Amy supposed he would just have to wait and see that the child had merely been reprimanded, or gotten a bad letter grade.

A knob must have been turned or a button pushed, because the next moment, Amy was clinging to the console as the TARDIS plunged through the atmosphere. It was quite a funny feeling, ripping through time and space. Weightless and airy and as if all your senses had been torn away and replaced with strange, new ones. It was also the most terrifying sensation ever if one wasn't properly prepared—or forewarned.

Jerkily, the TARDIS came to a swiveling halt. Amy picked herself off of the floor, where she'd landed after accidently letting go of the console. Gathering her newly scattered wits, Amy straightened her clothes, brushing her fingers through her now-tangled ginger hair. "You could have bloody warned me!"

"Right. I'll remember that for next time. Where's Rory?"

"Reading in the library." She answered coldly, still sore over the sudden travelling. The Doctor gave her a look, a stern one, and she knew she was to go retrieve her husband. She sighed agitatedly, then wandered off towards the hall, her arms crossed and her pouting mouth murmuring insults like a rebellious teenager. "_The bloody moron… What's a spaceman if he can't even control his own damned ship—"_

"_Pond_." he called warningly. She guiltily looked back, expecting to see him angry with her. But, again, she only saw sorrow; pleading. "Don't. Not right now."

Amy's eyes flitted to the ground, ashamed. Her fingers busied themselves nervously with a loose string on her beige jacket. "Sorry." She muttered in an embarrassed tone, turning to go find Rory again.

The Doctor didn't enjoy Amy when she was harvesting a grudge—and that's all she ever did whenever anybody reprimanded her. She acted sorry at first, then came the passive aggressiveness, and significantly displayed bitterness trudged closely behind that. Because heaven forbid the girl do anything even slightly wrong in her life that may need fixing or improving or anything otherwise that involved constructive criticism. She was _such_ a child, sometimes.

Thoroughly aggravated and, honestly, disappointed in the lack of maturity found in Amelia Pond—his companion, his confidante, his _responsibility_—he launched a lever harshly to the right, parking the TARDIS in the proper time and place. December 12th, 1983; second room off the front left hall; 1220 Dean St. in a crumbling town called Minnie, Oregon.

The Doctor waited as patiently as his instincts allowed. He looked towards the corridor that Amy had gone down just a few minutes before. She still wasn't back. He, of course, knew that the TARDIS was a complicated mess of rooms, but surely Amy knew enough of the string of halls and nearly unlimited doors by then to get to and from the library with ease. Every second felt like hours—costing that little girl additional trauma. He tried everything to distract himself until the Ponds got back. Making sure the time and place were exactly correct; keeping all the possible scenarios firmly locked out of his mind. But they weren't coming back. They had gotten lost or something—whatever it was, he found himself simply not caring at the moment.

So finally, brashly and irresponsibly, he pulled on the door of the TARIDS and stepped out.

The room he was in was impossibly dark and cold. And it wasn't the sort of cold that reminded one of Father Christmas and fiery mugs of hot chocolate, but it was a _wet_ sort of cold, the type that could loom gloomily over entire towns and carry the stomach flu along with it. It smelt like burnt tar and smoke. The Doctor waved a hand over his nose to clear the air a bit, but it didn't help much.

His vision adjusting, he began to be able to make out items of furniture. A lanky wardrobe, an upside-down rug, and a dusty window that lent a crummy view of the stars outside were just a few of the obstacles the Doctor ran into/tripped over while trying to manoeuvre about the small space. The nearly inaudible, rough breathing of a human signaled where the girl must be. The Doctor knelt down next to the lumpy bed, only to find the girl completely awake with a terrified expression on her face.

"Who are you?" She asked, her voice staying impressively steady.

"I'm the Doctor," he said, trying to make an effort at sounding calm.

"How did you get here?"

"I got your signal. You needed help."

The girl's eyes widened and she sat up weakly, brushing strands of wet hair aside. "That _worked?_"

He nodded silently. "Whatever it was—it certainly did. What's your name?"

"Rosie Sennett."

_Rosie. _

The sound of that name resonated through every part of him, striking memories like an electric current and stirring emotions more overwhelming than should be possible. _No. Don't. She's gone, understand? Gone. This girl needs you right now so don't be getting distracted by a simple coincidence. _Trying to clear his head, he decided right then and there that he couldn't call her that. It was too much.

Sighing in confirmation, he eyed her cautiously. It was so dark that he couldn't really see if there were any physical wounds on the girl. He could see that she was very malnourished, though, simply from the bony, shivering fingers which were dimly shown by the light of the waning moon.

"Well, Miss Sennett, let's get you out of here." The Doctor motioned to the blue police box taking up half of her minute room.

She gaped at him for a moment, and then shook her head ardently.

"Why not?" He questioned. "You're getting hurt here, aren't you?"

With reluctance, Rosie nodded, looking down in shame.

"Sennett, I won't hurt you. I promise. I'm here to help." His eyes searched her dark and wide and frightened ones. She shook her head again, her hair falling limply across her face as she scooted slowly away from him.

The Doctor tried to not be offended by this. He took her circumstances under consideration, but he also couldn't help but be a tad agitated at this response. He was just trying to help her, to get her out of this situation, but she wasn't cooperating. He just kept reminding himself that she was hurt and scared and that a strange man was probably the last thing she wanted in her bedroom at that moment.

"There was a lady with you. I meant for her to come." Rosie had stated it so plainly that it took a second to process what she was meaning—to whom she was indicating.

"Amy?" The Doctor questioned.

Rosie looked down, her fingers absent-mindedly twirling around a piece of thin fabric. "Is that her name?"

The Doctor thought for a moment, cringed at what was soon to come, and then nodded bitterly. "Yeah. That's her name." His tired voice sounded foreign to him—like the first words spoken from a new regeneration—it was something he would have to get used to.

"I'll be right back, Miss Sennett."


	3. Chapter 3

Amy and Rory had searched everywhere—the console room, the second library, even the swimming pool (which was closed for renovations, i.e. actually re-building the whole damn thing)—but they couldn't seem to locate the Doctor. And they were running out of places to look.

"Look, he's tired," Rory said after an hour of Time Lord scavenging had passed, limply tossing his arms into the air to complete the effect of being at one's total wit's end. "He's got a room, hasn't he? Maybe he's just resting."

Amy almost laughed. "The Doctor? Resting? Have you _seen_ the man? He's like an attention-deficit twelve year old, except without the hope that he'll grow out of it eventually."

"Well, he's near-human, right? Surely he's got to sleep every once in a while."

"Yeah, and I'm sure he does sleep, but the point is that he _wouldn't_ sleep—or rest or do whatever the hell Time Lords do to get energy—at a time like this." Amy's eyes lingered on the door of the TARDIS. _He wouldn't_, she thought to herself semi-calmly. _Not without us, at least. Right?_

"You know the Doctor," she continued in a strained voice, refusing to believe that he would just go out there and leave them behind _again_. "Holds a steadfast vow to not interfere—unless children are crying."

_Well,_ some_ children. _

It felt like the first chink in an unsteady dam. Amy faltered in her step and physically shuddered at that thought. No, that hadn't been a good thought at all. Of course he would have saved her, had he known. He loved her, he took care of her, of course he would have helped. Of course, of course… Then again, Amy told this to herself simply for her own want to feel secure. When it came right down to it, she didn't know if he would have interfered.

A bad thought trickled down her spine like the first droplets from the cracked dam, only encouraged into a gradual stream by a slew of sour memories.

It was too horrifying. She felt the need to go scrub herself ten times over. The dark seemed to encase her, trapping her. Amy could almost feel the burns on her wrists forming again, almost see the glint of her own pale fingers clutching at her pillowcase in the dim light of the moon, almost hear the agonizing squeak of her childhood ceiling fan as it slipped in and out of functioning. She had always been irritated by that fan. Why wouldn't it ever just die out completely? It didn't make sense. Everything else in her life was dead and done with, so why not that bloody ceiling fa—

She felt herself jump at Rory's touch.

"Hey," he said quietly, gently taking her shaky hand in his firm one. His light eyes were concerned, understanding. "Don't leave me like that."

Amy nodded, realizing that she must have looked mad just staring off and thinking those awful thoughts, and leaned against him. He hugged her close, and she felt more warmth and family than she ever had—loved, protected, cherished.

Yes, the Doctor did always manage to ruin these rare, tender moments between the couple. So, even if doing nothing but bearing seemingly-eternal tradition, in he walked, dejected and looking altogether like a wounded animal. He could hardly even look Amy in the eyes, and that certainly didn't make Amy feel any better about her recent remembrances.

"And where have you been off to?" She asked, trying to sound less like a mother and more like a worried friend.

"That girl out there needs you, Amy."

A silence dawned on everybody, even if only because of sheer confusion.

"What?" Amy asked, coming out of the strange stupor. "Why? What's the matter with her?"

The Doctor sighed. "Because… Well, because I think she's going through what you went through. She sensed it, somehow. I don't really know yet—possibly some sort of empathy link—but she did and she needs you to help her right now."

_He knows? He's not supposed to know! _She shouted inside her head. _Wait. Keep it up. Maybe he's talking about something else._

"What're you talking about?" With an inward curse, she noticed her voice falter at the end of the badly-delivered cover up.

"Amy…" the Doctor sighed again, more uncomfortably than the one previous. "You know."

Apparently, so did he.

Amy's eyes widened, her mouth falling slightly ajar. She stepped forward, towards him. "How? Who told you?" Her voice was steel and furious. This was her best kept secret. It was her demon that she preferred to keep away from her friends—especially the one friend who felt somehow compelled to feel personal guilt over everything that went wrong in her life.

"_Rory?_" She asked accusingly, turning to the man behind her.

He shook his head immediately. "_No_. I said I wouldn't tell anybody and I didn't. I swear."

"It wasn't him, Amy." The Doctor's eyes were so sad now that Amy couldn't tolerate looking at them any longer. "It was me. All me."

"_How?_ Is it that obvious?" Her voice was timid and unsure, once again cracking at the ends of her sentences.

"No. No, it isn't. Oh, Amy—my wonderful little Amy—you've done a great job covering it all up. Really, you have. You got a new life and it was working out beautifully. You've moved on, you aren't wallowing… I'm proud of you. It's more than I'd ever expect from someone who's gone through what you have." The Doctor looked her in the eyes then, letting his words sink into her consciousness. She took them gratefully. They were just what she needed to hear right then.

"But, as I'm sure you've noticed, I'm very perceptive." He added, smiling sadly and letting his eyes meet the floor again. "I see your reactions to yelling, Amy. To touch in general, to suddenness in any situation—I've absorbed all of that. You tense up, flinch. Remember the trip to Elether? You'd accidentally cut your arm, just sliced it all the way down, but you didn't even cry _once. _The way you process pain is astounding, I'll give you that, but your display of pent-up endurance only lead me to figuring out more."

Amy was left dumbfounded. Here was just another thing for the Doctor to feel sorry over, just another thing about her that he would try and fix. Next would come the interrogations that were set up like average, harmless conversations, then the obligatory comforting that she honestly didn't even need or want (it was all just to make him feel better about himself, though, right?), and then their lives would go back to normal—with him feeling as if he had singlehandedly righted some outrageous wrong, and she still needing simple love.

That's really all she wanted. Love.

"She's just outside, then?" Amy asked, making her way towards the door cautiously.

"Yes." The Doctor supplied the information as awkwardly as ever. "Her name's R-Ro—Ehm. Pardon me. _Rosie_." Amy didn't know why the name took so long to get out. Maybe he just had a cough or something.

_Well_, Amy thought as she opened the TARDIS door, _maybe all Rosie wants is love, too._


End file.
